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Getting Started
First, explore my website to see if this is what you really want to do and how to adapt it to you.
Second, go to weebly.com by clicking the link at the bottom of the page and create an account. Third, cruise through the template possibilities to see what fits the image and personality you would like to foster for your site. When you pick a template you are not just picking a background, you are selecting the look of your buttons and how the page will work with the background. Remember you can always change the template in the future. Fourth, start collecting and organizing content. As much as possible you will want to use your own photos or the free photos available on weebly. I like using my phone and emailing the photos to myself or uploading them to photo bucket. Content can be word files, pdf documents, pictures, youtube video, a word document, an external website...almost anything. Your free account will not let you directly embed video, but you can create a youtube account and upload video to that location. Fifth, think about how much you want to reveal about yourself. Is the site only about learning? Will you bring in some family? What about personal hobbies and interests? And how much do you reveal about your kids with best works pages? For example, I would never link a name to a photo of a student. 
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Why weebly.com?I like weebly.com because it is free.
I like weebly because it is easy (If you can drag and drop you can build a website). I like weebly because I can have up to two free sites. I like weebly because the formatting and page construction options give me access to all of the elements I find necessary to create a classy site. And, they are willing to answer questions if you navigate into deeper waters. I like that. The downside.... my free web address was www.johnriebli.weebly.com. That didn't look bad on paper but when you tried to tell someone about it....it made me sound like a children's poem. I started building my site the week of Thanksgiving 2013. Right after we ate our turkey on the eve of Black Friday I noticed a chance to buy for two years the rights to johnriebli.com for the reduced price of $45. (normally just under $70.) Also, weebly does put their name at the bottom. I don't mind that because it is free. A final plus, the weebly site formats automatically to your phone. And they have an app. The phone app won't let you work directly on your site, but it does give you number of hits each day, lets you change settings, and you can edit your blog. From the app I know that since Thanksgiving, 2013, 60,000 unique visitors have viewed my site....including 30 on Super Bowl Sunday. 
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PicturesInitially you might pull some images in off the web, but many of those photos are copyrighted. I would suggest you work with photos you actually have rights to...like the ones you shoot personally. Or look to weebly.
Bob Potasky notes you can search at weebly and get quality free photos. There are some exceptional images there. When you search, the professional gallery costs money, but the second gallery is free. There are many outstanding images....and they credit them at the bottom of the page. The pictures in the columns to the left are free from weebly. The one at the top is from my phone. Or get creative, for Computer Apps I saw a neat picture of a keyboard. I immediately thought....I could do that by just taking a picture of my keyboard so I pulled out my phone and shot the keyboard and uploaded it for the page. I didn't even have to move out of the chair to have my own "original" picture. Also, if you begin to think ahead about what you need to dress your site, you will start looking for photo opportunities that make your site personal and live. Getting a student to hold a prop like on the Decision's page is an example of that. Getting started info from weeblySuggested File Organization |
21st Century Tools you might want to make friends with:
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Snipping
This year I was blessed with a new room mate: Andrew And he was doing things I never heard of. He was having the kids snip assignments. So, What is snipping? Well, Windows 7, Windows 8 and even the lofty Macs can do it. The question is, "What is it?", "How do I do it." and "How did I get along without it these many years?" So first, What is it? Basically, anything that gets on your computer screen can be turned into an image. You can draw on that image. And you can save that image. 
Now you can upload your choice of image.
If you need your school picture see me. |
Things to know how to do
with your site. You need to know how to backup your site. The word we use is archive. Your site can be loaded into a compressed file and downloaded to your computer. To learn how to archive go here. You may want to make your site so only people you know can find it. You can't make it totally private, but you can make it unsearchable by keeping it un indexed.. To learn how To make your site unsearchable by robots go here. You may have a blog and not want people to post prior to your viewing the post. To change blog settings go here. Sometimes you might be testing a site and publish it, then want to unpublish the site totally. To un publish your site go here. There are accounts you might want to consider for image storage and video.
The accounts are free. These are some that I use. Photobucket: I love to take pictures. I seem to fill up a phone and then the card crashes or I buy a new phone and photos get lost. Photobucket lets me store a reasonable number of photos. I use their mobile app so I can upload photos from my phone on the road. When I purchased my 40th anniversary car I was updating a thread on miata.net about the car purchase with photos of a trip to the Oregon Coast during Winter Break. Without this account I could not have done that. I also find it very useful for moving images from one device to another and it greatly reduces the use of a flash drive and card reader. 
Youtube: if you have any video you want to display on the weebly site you cannot embed it directly without a paying account. However, there is no limit on youtube links. So, if you have a science project and you want to get those famous egg drops on your site you can easily do it with youtube. My hint is to use your edtools account to create the youtube account and it will be easier to remember the password.
For fun you might want to explore gif animations to give your page movement. When you make or find a gif just upload it as a photo.
Warning: if you re size the gif it probably will not play. 
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